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I do my best gardening on cold winter nights when the wind roars and the rains beat down. No, I'm not on my knees in the muck--I'm sitting in my easy chair with an inspirational garden book on my lap. I'm thinking and dreaming about how to improve my garden plot. I have some old favorites to re-read, such as A Joy of Gardening by Vita Sackville-West or To Everything There Is A Season by Thalasso Cruso. Recently I acquired a new one: Artists In Their Gardens by Valerie Easton and David Laskin (Sasquatch Books, 2001). These local garden writers have given my thoughts a whole new direction and I'm very excited about the change.
You see, in reading the book and looking at the wonderful photographs, I began to see that my own yard lacked something. I have lots of trees, grass, evergreen shrubs and rocks. In fact, my garden was very "Northwest Natural" in style. The featured artists and their gardens also used natural plantings, but, in addition, they had a common thread--they used color as brilliant, electric jolts of energy to startle you, to stop you and to make you see the gardens as new and different. This color came from both plant material and man-made things like chairs, pots, walls and statuary. Now, I have some colored foliage plants. I grow lots of annual and perennial flowers. I also have plenty of chairs, pots, fences, pergolas and arbors. But when I stopped to examine what I had done, I saw that my chairs were hunter green. My pots were brown. My walls and trellises were beige. In short, I was boring! I knew I had to fix that. Who wants to be boring?
I began by buying a quart of exterior semi-gloss acrylic paint. The color I chose this time was brilliant violet. I selected a chair that sits at the end of a gravel path, backed by a green hedge and fronting on the pond garden. I set to work with my brush and two coats of paint later I put the chair back on its gravel pad. Wham! The change was shocking. Before, the chair had just faded into the hedge and the eye had never stopped in any one place long enough for you to really pay attention to that portion of the garden. The bright spot of color changed all that.
The chair matched a nearby patch of "Sensation" cosmos exactly. I'll be planting more cosmos next season. I've always grown it--it's so easy and so reliable for late blossoms. I just never realized how wonderful that color could be in a mass. The violet paint also picked up the reds of the Houttuynia cordata and made their leaves even more colorful and intense (watch this plant, it’s invasive in some situations!). The Bergenias that grow on either side of the small gray footbridge in the midst of the gravel path have red undersides to their leaves--a thing I hadn't previously noticed. Having the chair so near made them stand out clearly. I'm looking forward to spring when the Bergenia blossoms come out on their shocking pink stocks. Even the gravel picked up a reddish hint. The whole view was suddenly richer and more interesting. Painting the chair made you look closer. You can't just blip past something that startling. You have to stop and investigate. Then you see in depth and in detail all the things that were already there that you had never noticed before.
With this revelation I was back at the home improvement center. Now the chairs under the wisteria arbor are daffodil yellow. The ones around the barbeque are sky blue and salmon. The large pot on the patio is blue as well--with a violet ornamental kale surrounded by yellow pansies planted in it. A violet pot holds a blue campanula.
Everywhere I look I'm seeing new possibilities for sparks of bright color. I can make the changes for the cost of a few cans of paint and a few hours time. The things I already have are being recycled, reused and renewed. I love it!
My husband blinked a few times and made snide remarks about sunglasses--but
he'll get over it. He's never wild about change. Of course, by the time he's
adjusted, I'll be ready to move on to other colors and other combinations. Don't
worry. You don't need to go completely wild to have this effect. Just one thing
can do it. So be brave--make a change --go for color in the garden. Failing
that, read a garden book by the fireside on a winter day. It's a good way to
find your own garden dream.
Hortsense: Managing plant problems with Integrated Pest Management
